People spend on average 2.6x more time on pages with video than without. (Wistia)

Including video in a landing page can increase conversion by 86%. (EyeView)

People want to consume video, and we need to meet them there when we’re promoting our marketing automation platform. Period.

Marketing automation is all about creating hyper-personalized conversations, and video content can be a big part of those conversations.

I had cut my teeth on video marketing in a previous role where I had the comfort of an in-house videographer and a long runway to deliver. With the capability in-house, mistakes weren’t costly and my learning curve was softened. Here, I had no easy landing. I needed to produce – and quickly.

Determining Our Video Marketing Strategy

Video can be effective in many areas – support, recruiting, events and more. However, as a SharpSpring marketer, my number-one priority is generating leads and moving them through our marketing funnel to the point where they attend a virtual demo of our marketing automation platform.

Our target audience – marketers and marketing agencies – are typically on the cusp of technology and are particularly in tune with what their peers are doing. It’s the ultimate version of ‘keeping up with the Joneses,’ and we decided to use it to our advantage.

Thus the focus of our first video series would be how businesses use marketing automation to expand and prove the ROI of marketing, and how marketing agencies use marketing automation to grow. To ensure the peer-to-peer angle, we’d be featuring our customers and agency partners.

Planning Our Video Marketing Campaign

We started by brainstorming a list of customers and agency partners who we felt could speak to the benefits of the SharpSpring platform. In order for each video to be distinct, we needed to get a variety of angles, but they all needed to point to the fact that SharpSpring is helping them achieve their goals.

We’re lucky in that our customers are marketers themselves, and therefore they didn’t need to be convinced of the value they’d get out of being featured in our videos (SEO juice, backlinks, social mentions, etc.). In that respect, it was an easy conversation.

For each video, I developed a conversation guide (as opposed to a script.) This consists of a list of 20 or so prompts. I asked each person to familiarize themselves with the prompts but to not worry about memorizing anything. I wanted their responses to feel comfortable and natural.

Filming Logistics

We filmed on site at our customers’ offices to feature their environments and teams in the b-roll. Each filming session was about four hours, with the interview portion taking about 45 minutes. Back at the office, I transcribed the interview and edited down to the key messages. For each segment, I suggested b-roll, but also trusted the video company to plug in their ideas. I then passed that document to the video company for production.

From each shoot, we produced one video dedicated to that customer, plus we used snippets of each shoot for additional montage-style videos featuring multiple SharpSpring customers.

Using Videos With Our Marketing Automation Platform

Using the SharpSpring landing page designer, we created a series of landing pages, each dedicated to one of the videos. We then created an email drip campaign that linked to these landing pages, and we ended up developing a few different campaigns depending on how much interaction a prospect had had with us:

Here are some examples of the videos and, in some cases, the landing pages that we designed for them:

These launched in Q2, so we’re still culling through the data to determine performance.

How are you using video and marketing automation?

One of the biggest hurdles to implementing a marketing automation platform is having enough content to ‘feed the machine.’ Video content is a great way to get there fast. Have any success stories of your own about using video and marketing automation? Feel free to share them with me – I’d love to hear them.